Sun Tzu saw that success in competition means building winning positions. For Sun Tzu, competition means a comparison of positions. A "battle" is any point of comparison where people decide whose position to support and whose to oppose. Creating conflicts is the most costly way to win these comparisons. Sun Tzu's system teaches us how to systematically advance our positions in the most effective way possible.
Sun Tzu's book is one of the most valuable works in human history. It is also one of the most difficult to understand. Much of Sun Tzu's writing is based on concepts in traditional Chinese science and philosophy with which modern readers are unfamiliar. Simply reading an English translation of Sun Tzu gives you very little idea of his methods. There are a number of serious barriers that stand in the way of our understanding the text. Much of what it teaches is diametrically opposed to what we think we "know" about competition.
To get you started, we give you an idea what the book covers in this brief summary of its chapters. We then explain the work's underlying cultural context and roots in Chinese science, especially its methods of diagramming relationships.
Below is one of the 232 articles in our Sun Tzu's Rule Book. Each explains one aspect of Sun Tzu' science and a step-by-step process for using it. We offer a new article every day following our Rule Book's Outline.
"There are only a few notes in the scale.
Yet you can always rearrange them.
You can never hear every song of victory."
Sun Tzu's The Art of War 5:2:11-13
Linear thinking requires using pre-planned processes, working with systems and machines. We are trained to use these systems without understanding them. We can start to think that we need not and cannot understand how systems work, but even things that can be hard to make can be easy to understand. We are not taught a comprehensive method for taking existing things apart to see how they are made to work. We take the existing components for granted. When we use products, machines, and processes, we are not aware of the parts. The human mind filters out what is expected and taken for granted.
Sun Tzu teaches that opportunities are hidden (3.2.2 Opportunity Invisibility). As we lose sight of the components of which things are made, an opening is created. We want to identify overlooked components that we can exploit. Those who take the time to break things into their parts can use this understanding to their strategic advantage.
The following seven rules describe Sun Tzu's systematic process for identifying the elements that can be rearranged or replaced to create surprise.
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| Peter Drucker on Strategic Planning It is remarkable how the same lessons need to be rediscovered again and again. Sun Tzu dealt with the confusion between a warrior's adaptive strategy in dealing with competing people and long-term planning in dealing with objects. We are still dealing with it today. In this 1973 book, Management... More... |
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